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Angry veterans' advocates say a Conservative MP on the House of Commons veterans affairs committee slept through their presentation about efforts to help...

EDMONTON — It's been one of the craziest weeks national politics has seen in some time — from the "outing" of the Wikileaker to the discovery of Pierre Poutine.

But I think the prize for the best line of the week goes not to any politician or pundit, but to Canadian veteran and social activist Jim Lowther.

Lowther did two tours in Bosnia and one in Afghanistan. He's also the founder of VETS, or Veterans Emergency Transition Services, a Halifax-based social agency that works to suppose homeless or distressed veterans.

Earlier this week, he and his colleague David MacLeod, VETS' director of policy and communications, were making a presentation to a group of MPs in Halifax. Lowther was annoyed when Calgary Conservative MP Rob Anders arrived late to the meeting, then fell asleep during the presentations.

"I looked down the table and there's Old Snoozy," Lowther told the Ottawa Citizen. "Old Snoozy at the end of the table didn't give a damn. That just fried my bacon."

There, I'm sure you'll agree, is a quote for the ages.

Anders could have humbly apologized for his human weakness and expressed concern for the plight of homeless vets. He could have made a little fun of himself for power napping on the job. Instead, Anders angrily denied he'd ever fallen asleep in the first place and accused Lowther and MacLeod of being pro-Vladimir Putin NDP hacks, engaged in a partisan smear campaign against him.

Now, that really fries my bacon.

Three different people, including Liberal MP Sean Casey, the vice-chairman of the Veterans Affairs committee, confirmed Anders fell asleep.

For Anders to insist he was awake the whole time makes about as much sense as my husband insisting he doesn't snore. When you're asleep, you're not actually all that aware of what's going on around you.

Perhaps that's also why Anders is confused about what was said at the meeting.

David MacLeod, who described himself to the Citizen and the Globe and Mail as a card-carrying member of the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Party and a supporter of Conservative MP Peter MacKay, has said he mentioned, approvingly, that the Russian government had set up a special hospital to treat veterans of combat in Afghanistan and Chechnya, who were dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. But the ex-intelligence officer, who spent 27 years in the military and worked with Norad, publicly mocked Anders' insinuation that he's pro-Putin, or pro-Russian. And how odd, for a Canadian politician to be Red baiting as though this were 1952, not 2012. (Did Anders, like some latter-day Sleeping Beauty or Rip Van Winkle, sleep right through the end of the Cold War? Or did he, in his dream-state, have Putin confused with Poutine, of robocalls fame?)

As for Lowther, it is true that the outspoken veterans' advocate was denied access to a Stephen Harper campaign rally in Halifax last spring, a story that made national headlines. It's also true that Lowther publicly praised both former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and the late NDP leader Jack Layton at the time for being willing to meet with him to hear his concerns about post-traumatic stress, veterans, and homelessness. Nonetheless, Lowther has told the Globe and Citizen that he is a card-carrying member of the Conservative Party of Canada.

It's easy to mock Anders' snooze and subsequent hissy fit — and hey, every mother knows how cranky kids get right after a nap. But simply making fun of Calgary's most gaffe-prone MP does an injustice to all Canadian veterans.

With Canada's mission in Afghanistan come to conclusion, thousands of brave men and women are back, looking for work, re-adapting to civilian life, some struggling to cope with physical injuries, others dealing with less visible psychological scars. In terms of education, half of the soldiers in the Canadian Forces today have only a high school diploma or less, and many have no civilian work experience, having entered the military at 18 or 19. For some vulnerable veterans, struggling with depression, post-traumatic stress, underemployment or relationship breakdown can lead to a spiral of addiction that sees them on the street.

Jay Freeman of Edmonton's Homelessness Commission and Kelsey Strachan of the Hope Mission said despite its large military community, Edmonton isn't experiencing an issue with homeless veterans. But Freeman says U.S. statistics, which show that 35 out of the every 100,000 American war veterans are homeless, suggest reason for vigilance here. Strachan says the Hope Mission has just begun tracking the number of veterans that it serves, the better to monitor the situation. But really, we don't want to wait until people are homeless before we act — it's up to all our support systems to kick in to aid veterans long before they're on the street. It's a serious issue, one that deserves our full, alert attention.

This week is not the first time Anders, Alberta's "dreamy" MP, has, quite literally, fallen asleep on the job. Last November, his House of Commons snooze made him a YouTube star. If the 39-year-old has serious health problems that interfere with his ability to serve the public, he owes it to Canadians, and to himself, to get medical treatment.

Otherwise, perhaps it's finally time for the sleepy Tory voters of Calgary West to wake up, give their heads a collective shake, and ask themselves exactly why they continue to vote for Old Snoozy. The real embarrassment here, after all, isn't what Anders does when he's asleep. It's what he says when he's awake.